Do You Want To Play a Game?

Having missed out on the last THREE get-togethers, I thought I'd post up what little gaming I've managed to get done outside the GNN fold. Since last monday's impromptu game of Alhambra at mine, I've only managed to play one game. One third of a game, truth be told. But it was Twilight Struggle.

I had my mate Pascal staying on sunday and monday nights. He plays a lot of chess, and as a result is fairly skeptical about my obsession with 'modern games'. That is to say, he totally gets the obsession bit; the cardboard sniffing, the rules ingesting, the meeple fondling — him having had a long-standing thing about new pens — but he still needs convincing that they're actually worth playing.

I've slowly begun to win him over. Earlier in the year, he and his girlfriend Helen stayed and we introduced them to Settlers. I say 'we'; you all know about Charlotte's galeforce indifference to gaming — but she does like a bit of Settlers, and a bit of Alhambra too, in a casual, after-dinner sort of way. She draws the line at Stone Age.

Settlers went down well, as I thought it would. And more recently, Pascal and I have managed a game of Dominion, which he grasped quickly and enjoyed. A couple of traditional gateway games; one a tried and true classic, the other a very clever mechanic, together designed to illicit that face they do on cornflake adverts after taking the first mouthful — the pleasantly surprised 'I had no idea boardgames could be this much fun — I'm going to have to re-design my entire life so that it revolves around them' kind of face.

So this visit, I cast about for the obvious 'next step'. Alhambra? Stone Age? A five-hour card-driven chit-based war game about the Cold War?

Pasc doesn't need patronising — if he's going to get in to something, he wants to get as much of what it has to offer from the word go, really. Added to which, we have a shared love of espionage thrillers, steely movies like Le Samurai, The Ipcress Files, and much more recently Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; films that don't hide behind special-effects and chrome, but evoke a cool, dark world of international intrigue.

That all said, I hadn't played Twilight Struggle, which was, of course, the main reason behind my deciding it was the one we needed to play this time. And I wanted to show him that games could be grown-up; that they're not all trolls and zombies, or resource-management. Or zombie management.

Sunday night, I mentioned it, and showed him the box. On monday during the day, he brought the subject up a couple of times, but it wasn't until about 9.30 on monday evening, after sausages, cider and red wine, that we actually got the board out. 'Right, just tell me which are the snakes and which are the ladders', he wisecracked.

Despite being someone who actively dislikes learning rules, he absorbed them patiently, and by 10pm we were embarking on the first round. By midnight, we were finishing the second round, and I suggested we might pack it in. It had been a hugely steep learning curve, and while I was sure I'd want to try again sometime, I was suffering the effects of a vastly heavy cognitive load. And the Drambuie was out, too.

But Pasc, quite rightly really, wanted to push on — we'd only just got to grips with the rules, after all.

In the end we got to the end of round four, the first of the mid-war rounds. And his instinct to keep going was spot on, because the game really did click. Those last two rounds were much more aggressive, vying for influence in all seven regions of the board, and hatching longer term plans. I can see how deep it could get, once you know the cards, and the likelihood of scoring rounds in each stage of the game - pushing operations in South America to force your opponent to take his eye off the ball in the Middle East(to anyone who knows the game I'm going to sound like a total noob, I appreciate).

I think Pasc enjoyed it — I know he enjoyed having a tour of the upper-echelons of the hobby.

It would take a long, rainy sunday in the black mountains to really make the most of a game like Twilight Struggle. But for someone who confessed earlier in the evening to having fond memories of Cluedo, he certainly stepped up to the plate. And I have him to thank for finally getting TS to the table.

Oh and he won. As Russia. Well he didn't really win, because we only played four rounds, right?

And I was reading the rules for both of us. And it was beginners luck. Look let's just say he was in the lead when we abandoned the game.

JB